May 1, 2024
Hollinghurst, the Somerset Maugham Award-, James Tait Black Memorial Prize-, and Booker Prize-winning author, follows Dave and Giles across 50 years, as they meet in boarding school and come of age. Dave succeeds as an actor, and Giles grows into a dangerous force in politics. This is Hollinghurst's first novel since The Sparsholt Affair. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from August 19, 2024
Booker winner Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty) traces the divisions of post-Brexit London in this elegant tale of two men’s divergent paths across decades. Dave Win, an aging gay actor, fondly remembers Mark Hadlow, the philanthropist who sponsored his education, after Mark’s death at 94. Hadlow funded Dave’s boarding school scholarship in the 1960s, where Dave was classmates with Mark’s bully son, Giles, now a leading Brexiteer whose own mother calls him an “authoritarian.” In what proves to be a brilliant stroke of misdirection, Hollinghurst suggests in the opening pages that the novel will be Giles’s. Instead, Dave takes center stage, devoting the bulk of his narration to a life well lived, despite homophobic intimidation at school and the racial prejudice he faced during his career, which often saw him typecast in servant roles (he’s half Burmese). He recounts the loving relationship he has with his single mother, Avril, a dressmaker; his success in the theater; and joyful romantic relationships. Neither he nor the reader ever learns the details of Avril’s brief liaison with Dave’s biological father in Burma after WWII, but its mystery charges the pages with melancholic intensity, as do the prejudices Dave faces throughout his life, which define his fate in the wrenching conclusion, when Giles’s vision of the world plays a decisive part. Hollinghurst proves once more to be a master of emotive prose. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA.
Starred review from September 15, 2024
British Burmese actor Dave Win self-deprecatingly calls himself "a queer old puzzle." If he is, this novel sets about solving that puzzle by limning Dave's life from preadolescence to his seventies. In his youth, he wins the Hadlow Exhibition, which sends him to the Bampton School and introduces him to its patron, the wealthy philanthropist who will become a kind of father figure to him. At Bampton, and later at Oxford, Dave proves himself to be gifted in acting, the career he will pursue. In adulthood, three men figure significantly in Dave's life: an older man, a fellow actor, and--when Dave is 60--the editor who will become his husband. As it happens, Dave's dressmaker mother is also in a same-sex relationship. Late in life, Dave will begin writing a book, which the reader infers is a memoir to be titled Our Evenings--suggesting that this is the very book he is writing. And he's a brilliant writer. This is an extraordinary novel from Booker Prize-winner Hollinghurst (The Sparsholt Affair, 2018), memorably conceived, beautifully executed, and a gift to lovers of serious literary fiction. Every aspect is flawless: complex, multi-dimensional characters, subtle treatment of emotions, beautiful writing, a vividly realized theatrical setting, and more.
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Starred review from September 15, 2024
The fictional memoir of a gay biracial British actor of rare intelligence and elegance, over a half decade of social change. Hollinghurst's seventh novel features a narrator who, like his creator, is about 70: David Win--the dark-skinned son of a British woman and a man she met while working as a typist in Burma after World War II--was raised by his mother on her own in provincial England. The story opens with a fairly recent event: the death of Mark Hadlow, a mentor whose family offered a scholarship that allowed David to attend an elite prep school from the age of 13 in the early 1960s. Along with the challenges he faced there due to his race and class, he was often targeted by Hadlow's son Giles, a bully who we know has grown up to be a right-wing member of parliament in the era of Brexit, even now "tearing up our future and our hopes." The first half of the book relies on what Win calls his "famous memory" to unfold the story of his adolescence--one brilliant section is set during a seaside holiday when his head whips back and forth between a good-looking Italian waiter, the men on the beach in their bathing suits, and his dressmaker mother and her customer Mrs. Croft, funder of this vacation, now revealed to be much more than a friend. The expansive architecture of this book fluidly slips you from one phase of David's life to the next, examining the ups and downs of his acting career and his love affairs--and then suddenly there's an ending you will likely find yourself reading several times so you can fully take in its subtlety, power, and emotion. Hollinghurst continues to amaze and delight, hitting both the most delicate grace notes and portentous chords perfectly.
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